This blog began as an online newspaper about Kings Cross, Sydney. It now focuses on the deep problems of drug prohibition - which are so intrinsic to Kings Cross anyway - and exposes the many flaws in the prohibitionist argument, and the pseudo-science that governments fund to prop up their unjust and ineffective laws. Comments are welcome, but please be polite! Content on this site reflects only the views of the writer and are not necessarily those of the editor or any other organisation.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

The hardcore spinners returned yesterday maintaining the tradition of Two-up in the Cross on ANZAC Day.

Cries such as 'We need a tailbacker for $80 or any part thereof' rang out before those coins marked with an 'X' on the heads side hit the fine gravel betting rings supplied by Council.

The games started in the early hours of 25 April as soon as the rain eased after midnight. They ran smoothly with bets as high as $300 plus changing hands.

The games were played under the awning near the station entrance until the trains started running at 3.30am and the early risers headed for the Dawn Service at Martin Place began trickling through.

The police then asked the players to move to the big ring on the corner of Roslyn Street where they could be seen carrying on again later in the evening.

Oxford Street was different again, with lots of in-uniform sailors (male & female) out in the bars.

There, impromptu art and messages had been posted. One cardboard sign taped to a smartpole said 'Aboriginals were soldiers too. Black and proud'.

A printed poster on the old Gowings building was titled 'Lest we forget' in a decorative script. Below was a portrait of a young soldier with the extended barrel of a handgun going right through his head. Below that, in the same script, was written 'And yet we do it again'.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The manager of one store has confirmed this, smiling ruefully among expansive shelves sparsely stocked with dildoes, frilly knickers and the like, which are apparently permitted by the uniformed guardians of our morals.

'What can you do about it?' he said.

Presumably all the customers are simply buying their porn in Oxford St , the city or their home suburb, not to mention the booming mail order businesses from Canberra.

We now live in a surreal world where the only place in NSW you can't buy porn is Sydney's red light district. And despite constant Police complaints that they don't have enough resources, they seem to have enough to maintain this farce and to sit around, presumably, watching thousands of X-rated videos in their search for child pornography.

Apart from the obvious stupidity and insincerity of this situation, it's a clever tactic when you couple it with City of Sydney's anti-cluster rule.

This rule forbids the opening of any sex-related business within 100 metres of another such business. You see the plan -- send one of these businesses broke and Kings Cross will be one step further towards the 'mother-and-child-friendly retail precinct' that Clover Moore and the sycophantic Kings Cross Partnership explicitly fantasise about.

The rule dates back to South Sydney Council before the state abolished it but with one crucial difference.

South Sydney, recognising that it's probably better to keep red light businesses in the red light district, exempted the Cross from the rule. After the initial forced amalgamation Lucy Turnbull, unelected within her new domain, applied the rule to the Cross just before the $20 million streetscape works turned the Cross into a customer-free war zone for 16 months.

Clover Moore, who received at least half her Mayoral campaign budget from Lucy Turnbull's Living City corporation, has maintained the rule.

However the plethora of empty shopfronts in the Cross suggests that if one of these businesses closes, we will be stuck not with happy mums and kids shopping but rather with another dead doorway full of rubbish and street people, bless them, or yet another bar much to the horror of some locals who campaign against them.

Meanwhile 200 injections a day continue to happen at the MSIC and Kings Cross remains the national destination for marginalised wanderers, backpackers and groups of drunken premarital bucks and hens.

A cheering street crowd was well entertained by Monday night's siege at the Astoria Hotel in Darlinghurst Road (see picture). It turned out the gun was only a cigarette lighter, but hey, that's The Cross. Why would anyone single out this environment for a mother-and-child retail precinct?

It's the place people go to party, a healthy pressure-relief valve despite the street fallout. Most locals live here because they LIKE it that way and those that don't like it should not move here, as several recent court cases approving more pubs and clubs have recognised.

Mother-and-child retail precinct? Please get real. Take the screws off and let The Cross be The Cross.

Yet the War on Kings Cross continues. Clover Moore, using Council money, has lost at least two court cases mounted against strip club spruikers and continues to lose other court cases as she tries to wind back the opening hours of pubs and clubs.

By contrast, she is letting the Barons Building be demolished on the grounds that Council might lose any court appeal.

Her actions in Kings Cross belie her funky gay-friendly image and show her to be as much witch-burning inquisitor as inner city libertarian.

They also contradict her empty 'City of Villages' slogan as she tries to kill the most distinct village in Sydney. 'City of middle class uniformity' would be a more accurate slogan. Do you think it would get votes?

Page visits last 7 days

About Me

Hello again. world. I am a journalist, designer and photographer eking out a living by grazing on economic opportunities that come my way. I have run my business, Superkern Design Pty Ltd, since 1991. The gross oversupply of designers being pumped out by a dysfunctional university system has made it very difficult to survive as a designer since the late '90s, but on balance I like the advantages of working for myself at home. The older I get, the more human affairs look farcical. The average person is pretty damn average, you see. But there you go. I try to inject some commonsense into the public discourse which, at least in Sydney, is increasingly dominated by moral panics and middle-class agendas of control and gentrification. I don't quite understand why people from alternative subcultures tend to be quite happy for the middle class to live their lives as they wish, but the reverse is not true. And yet this same middleclass constantly use the words "diversity" and "tolerance". It's a funny old world.
See my Superkern and photoart sites linked above.